Bathers

This 1870 oil study of bathers reveals the range of Carpeaux's interests as a painter alongside his dominant reputation as a sculptor. The bathing figure had been a traditional subject in French academic painting since the eighteenth century — Boucher and Fragonard had made it central to Rococo decorative programs — but by mid-century Courbet's realist bathers and Renoir's emerging sensual approach were reshaping the genre. Carpeaux's small oil bathers belong to a private exploratory practice rather than to the prepared public canvases he occasionally exhibited at the Salon. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum holds this work within a collection that includes important examples of French nineteenth-century painting. The year 1870 was personally turbulent for Carpeaux: the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July preceded the siege of Paris, and he departed for London to escape the conflict, a period during which he continued painting but under difficult conditions. These bather studies represent an artistic temperament that never stopped observing and recording, even as political upheaval disrupted the normal structures of patronage and exhibition.

Oil on canvas executed with the freedom characteristic of Carpeaux's private studies rather than his presentation pieces. The figures are modelled with sculptural awareness of volume and mass — his training as a sculptor is evident in the way form is apprehended in three dimensions before being translated into paint. Flesh tones are warm and freely applied.